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Holy Family school seeks to play hiding game for Guinness

Kuniko Teramura, it’s nothing personal. That game of hide-and-seek you played April 4, 2010, the one where 188 people scurried around Kojinyama Koen in Hikone, Japan, probably was super fun. And the crowd of players was big enough to get you in the Guinness Book of World Records.

But here’s the thing: The students at Holy Family Catholic School figure they can muster a game of at least 400 people. All they want is the opportunity to try.

On Friday, the sixth-grade class at Holy Family learned their proposal for a Guinness World Record breaker is one of 10 national finalists. Two months ago, Guinness emailed schools and educators around the country with the opportunity to break a world record. Students and teachers wrote proposals, and 10 were chosen.

Now, people have until Sunday to vote for the winning proposal.

“It’s up to America to decide,” said Yolanda Pacheco, a Holy Family science teacher who presented the idea to the school’s 37 sixth-grade students. “We’re votes away from actually doing it.”

She said the students first brainstormed, coming up with ideas ranging from making the biggest flag out of recycled bottles — “But the world record on that is really big,” Pacheco said — to the world’s biggest hot dog. That one was a little impractical, too.

“But then we came up with hide-and-seek and thought, how easy would that be?” Pacheco explained. “We can do this.”

They researched existing records and wrote a proposal, including how they would incorporate the record-breaking attempt into the classroom: “This can be incorporated in our daily classroom by calculating how many students we would need to break the record, cooperative learning skills on how to go about this feat and how much room we would need to accommodate all the participants. This would be a great community building activity,” they wrote.

The schools they’re up against have proposed breaking records for the most people doing jumping jacks at one time, the world’s longest friendship bracelet, the most people participating in science experiments at one time, the largest gathering of people dressed as storybook characters and the largest anti-bullying mural made with recycled materials.